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Comment by b7r6 | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware that I'm in the minority here, but I find that investing heavily in being able to type fast and handle the tools well actually changes what code I write and not just how quickly.

The faster I've gotten at moving code around, the more subconsciously willing I've been to try something with a modest probability of working out, and more importantly the easier it's gotten to throw away a draft that isn't working out and try again.

LLMs haven't made it into my coding workflow yet, but I can see how they could be useful and the trend seems to be that they'll be in most high-octane workflows at some point.

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I think this is true but I also found limiting returns on going faster and at some point your just confident enough to try out if it is a good idea. It also becomes easier to justify, you become more trusted and you evaluate better.

Maybe that makes everyone hit that point easier, maybe it brings that point in for you. Not sure.

I used to attend cross-team meetings with a guy (works for AWS now) who was a tech lead and meeting facilitator. He gathered the agenda, presented during the meeting, assembled notes during the meeting, and distributed the notes via email at meeting conclusion. He keyboarded the entire time, looking up at the projected display. Fastest touch typist I recall seeing.

Yes, but being the faster foot shooter in the room doesn't cut it either.

Smartness isn't wisdom.

AIs are, at most, producers of synthetic smartness.

a good programmer is almost certainly a fast typer

of course a fast typer does necessarily make a good programmer

Yes and no. Most of my stuff is automated, auto completion and micro code gen. My thinking is the bottleneck, never typing speed. Measured it last summer a few times trying to beat my daughter and I think it was about 60wpm. For coding if I know what I'm doing its probably 30wpm in my editor.

Yeah, these days, IDEs like JetBrains are powerful enough that you can pull off significant chunks of refactors with a few right clicks (any sort of renaming, moving of methods, or deletion of code)

Typing will get you places faster, but some of the most productive tools we have don’t rely on it at all.

do you write documentation, though?

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